AGNI 21

Founder Askold Melnyczuk opens AGNI 21—an emphatically Whitmanesque issue—by stressing the role and responsibility of the poet, particularly in relation to the ongoing mystery of the American experiment. The poet must once again fuse “the material world, that of the body,” with “the spiritual world, that of the word.” This cannot be done purely through adherence to the conventions of technique. It requires imagination and careful perception, as found here in the poems of Agha Shahid Ali, Albert Goldbarth, Wayne Koestenbaum, Irina Ratushinskaya, Dick Allen, Rosanna Warren, and many others. Fiction by Lee Abbott and Sharon Sheehe Stark balance against an essay in which Sven Birkerts untangles the knots in James Wright’s “Hammock.”